


forces we had ranged within us, within us and against us

by LightDescending



Series: two women together is a work [1]
Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Backstory, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Developing Relationship, F/F, Non-Explicit Sex, Non-Graphic Violence, Relationship Study, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-06-02 08:55:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19438120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LightDescending/pseuds/LightDescending
Summary: It doesn’t take much – a shifting of pressure, the creak of bedsprings – and May is awake, so tired her eyelids sting. For a second, as she moves across the bedsheets, the parts warmed by their bodies and the ones still cool, she thinks it might be Ben.“I had a bad dream,” May mumbles , “a dream you were dead --” but then the smeary shadows resolve into a slim figure, one who stiffens even as she’s dipping down to pick up her clothes from the floor. A heavy pause before Liv huffs a tiny laugh, back in her throat.“No one’s got that kind of luck so far.”(A character study for Olivia Octavius and May Parker, their relationship and the interior of their lives, and the complexities of that as they enter later life. Also, an exploration of who they might be before, during, and after the events of the film).





	forces we had ranged within us, within us and against us

It doesn’t take much – a shifting of pressure, the creak of bedsprings – and May is awake, so tired her eyelids sting. For a second, as she moves across the bedsheets, the parts warmed by their bodies and the ones still cool, she thinks it might be Ben.

“I had a bad dream,” May mumbles , “a dream you were dead --” but then the smeary shadows resolve into a slim figure, one who stiffens even as she’s dipping down to pick up her clothes from the floor. A heavy pause before Liv huffs a tiny laugh, back in her throat.

“No one’s got that kind of luck so far.”

May winces, rubs her eyes with the tips of her fingers. Liv resumes getting dressed, and May’ll be damned if she’s not watching the muscle movements in Liv’s thighs, lean and wiry as they are. Her arms, her shoulders, reaching up; the dark tumble of her hair across her back while she pulls on a loose sleeveless shirt. A glance at the glowing numbers projected on the wall of Liv’s apartment show that it’s somewhere around 1 in the morning. Less time gone by than May expected. Probably Liv waited just until May fell asleep before getting up.

“I thought you were staying,” May finally says, voice a little clearer. There’s an edge of petulance slipping in, but she’s cracked her 60’s and sleeping alone depresses her. She reaches out a hand, and Liv takes it for a second, squeezes, before letting go. 

“Never said I wasn’t.” A gentle glow as Liv straps her watch back onto her wrist, the greenish glow sharp-outlining the angles of her face while she squints at whatever tiny messages are scrolling out. At some point, Liv had put her glasses back on, and they reflect light from the watch. May can’t quite see her eyes, but it already feels like Liv is half-there; even her posture has changed, the way May’s seen a million times, leaning in to what she’s focused on and shutting out the rest of the world. She could be miles away. “I just have some work to do. I tried not to wake you.”

“Yeah, well…” May closes her eyes again. “I sleep lightly these days.”

She can hear the smirk in Liv’s voice, a renewed clarity as she briefly tunes in long enough to make an innuendo. “I can do it nicely next time.”

“What, do you think I’m still 50?” She still feels honeyed, warm and spent, but she’s already remembering the way it feels to be pinned down by Liv’s body with Liv’s hand between her legs, and there’s a tiny thrill that sparks behind her breastbone. May keeps lying there, waiting to hear Liv walk away so she can roll over and grab the pillow she’d been sleeping on, but instead, there’s footsteps towards the bed. Liv’s hair tickles against her face, and then there’s lips gently pressing against her neck, right where the jawline meets her earlobe, and May’s breath hitches for a second.

“I won’t destroy New York or anything while you’re asleep,” comes the whisper, shivering into her ear.

“… Better not,” May manages.

And then Olivia is gone.

\--

In order to succeed in the pursuit of knowledge, Olivia decided, you couldn’t flinch away from what was ugly, despicable, grotesque, maybe brutal.

She’d been accused of psychopathy, maybe sociopathy – wasn’t convinced of the clinical viability of any diagnosis from the DSM-V, really, except maybe the one about ADHD. If anything, Liv figured she felt too much, too deeply, too acutely. Excessive fear, curiosity, exuberance, passion, wonder, anger, even guilt. Especially anger. What she had no time to entertain was regret.

Her brain felt afire most times – skewed strongly anxious and irritated when she didn’t sleep or eat enough, had a baseline status of being _really_ excited about… everything. There was a particular delight in moments of flow. It was sexy. Better than orgasm or spicy food or exercise or a really good cup of coffee. Many days, she astonished even herself with how quickly she parsed new input, absorbing and responding to new stimuli instinctively, often putting the “whys” into words long after the moment was over. Act first, process during and later. It made her a nightmare to work with sometimes, she knew – some people couldn’t keep up, and she lost patience having to slow down and explain. Mostly, she didn’t bother.

May had been one of the few who’d surprised her. Her adopted kid, too, even if he had massive gaps in his theoretical frameworks and background literature when he came in as an RA. Still, academia could be so self-involved. Peter had that same spark of practicality and insight that May had; it let him cut past all the bullshit and focus on praxis rather than only lofty theory or deadened functionality. She’d loved working with him. And she knew how much he meant to May. Seeing his face in the smouldering remains of the first collider… that hit her like a suckerpunch, and she had to pretend the fight was the reason she had to catch her breath before she started the work order to get everything back online.

Her environmentalist friends sometimes talked about deep ecology as a concept. About the value of life outside its instrumental utility to human needs; the idea that humans were no more important than any other ecosystem players, and no less important either. She sat back during their debates, one of which prompted a laughing fit that almost made her snort kombucha through her nose. It was 2018, and her ecology had all but bottomed out.

She saw herself simultaneously as a grand conductor and an inconsequential meat sack – capable of exerting her will over her sphere of influence, and holding no more significance than any other aggregate of cells in the world. As meaningful as a slime mold.

Liv figured the way things were going, humans had forfeited all right to exist on the planet. No matter how you sliced it, there were no actions or options available in the course of living which couldn’t be connected to some tragic outcome. There wasn’t a system in existence that wasn’t racing towards entropic decay. Every microchip in every smart device linked to and reliant on the production of tonnes of toxic byproducts, leaching into global water supplies, accumulating heavy metals and worse into the tissues of every being in proximity to their manufacture. Feel-good green-living expos thrown in wealthy nations in pristine sanitized buildings, while the mallet of lifestyle and industry pummeled third-world countries into accepting shipping containers of displaced refuse and waste. Expanding flood zones toppling mortgage values overnight for white suburban retirees and the victims of intergenerational racialized poverty alike. Every ounce of plastic an echo of the micro-variety sifting to the bottom of the ocean floor.

Trying to do _good_ was laughingly futile in that context. Now, trying to be _effective_ – Liv excelled at that. Why not play a bit? Why not push reality ‘til it breaks?

“Is this _fun_ to you?” May had yelled once.

It was.

A nuclear accident or climate catastrophe loomed so cosmically huge in their present that it was an inevitability. She’d grown up with parents of the Cold War era, for Christ’s sake. Done duck-and-cover drills from her elementary years on. Dr. Olivia Octavius had always been brilliant. If they were all on the way out, she aimed to be magnificent. Utterly _incandescent_.

Knowledge meant squat. It meant everything. It meant proving to everyone that there were other dimensions out there, and maybe – _just maybe_ – that meant there was one where humans hadn’t fucked everything up.

\--

May was determined that no one could ever accuse her of a lack of integrity. The truth was that if you were active in the community, it meant you stuck together through the hookups and the breakups and the drama of it all – these were your people. May still called up her first girlfriend on the phone to ask how she and her wife were doing over in Philly, and they’d been together in _high school_ – way back in the 70s. So what was she supposed to do about Liv?

You don’t divest yourself of connections like this; don’t burn decades-old bridges unless it’s the only choice you have.

May lived as rightly as she knew how – paid her taxes, yelled at some representatives over the phone, encouraged others when they did something that wasn’t idiotic, and fell along the lines of _helping_ people. She went to the synagogue that she and Ben had attended for years, went to the sidelines of the Pride parade every year to cheer the kids on. Kept up Peter’s lab. Tried to keep up a presence in her friends’ lives. Went to therapy when it got too much to handle after Ben was gone.

And she associated with a known felon. May could never reconcile the images she had of Liv in her mind – laughing, passionate, _intelligent –_ with the callous violence of Doc Ock, the things she _knew_ Liv was doing.

When the dissonance of it all became overwhelming, May took long walks outside. Kept taking steps, one after another – tried to really _see_ the people around her. Learn a bit about whatever narrative they were living through. Listened to the birds. Watched squirrels. Let her feelings rise and ebb and tried to listen to what they were saying without interrogation or inattention. _And nobody gets out of it, having to swim through the fires to stay in this world._

The truth was, there was an ache of loss inside her. It never entirely went away. She imagined herself like an old reel of film, the kinds she’d grown up watching clack through a projector; what strips she would cut out if she was able, how she’d rearrange different elements, where she’d like to rewind to and try a different path. She knew parts of what Olivia was researching, and it made her think. Were there universes where everyone’s choices played out differently? Places where Peter hadn’t let the thief go, where instead the courage to act swelled in that moment? Was there a time when _she_ had worn the suit? Or married Liv instead?

May privately grieved more about the universes she’d never get to see, the layers of existence she’d never experience even tangentially _,_ than for most of the losses she felt in this one. Everything ended, but wasn’t that human? To wonder what was next, or what was running parallel to your own view of the world? The best stories, May had always thought, were the ones where you got to hear from more than one perspective. That was what she’d loved about Ben, about Peter – when she’d wanted to know what they were thinking, all she’d had to do was ask. Hearing about the world from their vantage expanded her own.

To deal with the omnipresence of the world’s grief is not a question of endurance or struggle, but of grace – how much fight do you put in before accepting that you’re only human, that you can only do so much? May’s seen too many people succumb to one extreme or the other in response to that question. Liv’s giddy nihilism was a model example of one extreme. From what Peter had shared with her before he died, Fisk’s megalomania was another. May understood both kinds of reaction and knew Olivia too well not to forgive her. Liv was one of the greatest lessons in her life about inherent limitations regarding another person’s agency, especially when it came to darker impulses. 

They’d all lost people. You went on regardless of your feelings on the matter, thought May, and her own talents lay in outfitting the younger generation to be faster, stronger, more powerful than she’d ever managed to be. Purpose gained from making cutting-edge tech, providing safe haven, giving a kind word or an ass-kicking, depending on which was called for.

May was tired. Not because she thought she could be more, but because some days, there was too much of herself, and she was weary of her own company.

And she was a little jealous of all Olivia had accomplished, which was absolutely the _last_ thing in the world Liv needed to hear.

\--

When May was younger, she felt sometimes like she had gotten away easy in life, and wasn’t really sure what to do about that – it seemed like all around her, people had it worse through no fault of their own. Tragedies struck them, of circumstance or randomness or abuse. By all accounts, she thought, her life had been infinitely easy. She’d grown up in comfort. The pain came to her later, and it was intimate. It struck at her routines, at her habits. At her heart. But Olivia had been there through all of that, for reasons May never quite understood.

They’d met in the same graduate program – Liv a brilliant pre-candidate, May returning to school for her degree and almost a decade older. Gotten involved in the same groups. They still remember the 80s, the 90s – Reagan, the AIDS crisis, how all around them people had gotten sick, the club nights turning into wakes, the helpless fury of it all. Numbness had settled in for May every summer in the early 2000s as rights got shuffled around like so many cards, a will-they-won’t-they game she was too implicated in to go unaffected. More recently, she remembers Liv calling her up on the phone when DOMA finally kicked the bucket, something acidic in her tone while she asked whether May thought this meant gay people would finally start getting visitation rights in the hospitals.

How could you walk away from something like that? From living through it together?

Ben had been glad that she’d made a friend, given the age gap May had faced as a mature student with a husband. Granted, it had been impossible to ignore Liv; she’d made sure of that, between her impressive ability to project her voice and her provocation of controversy in class discussions. Olivia had gone for the throat when it came to making her arguments, to the point where the class leaned in every time Liv’s hand shot up. She’d made a reputation for herself on stringing together a couple of benign introductory statements based on the current lecture topic and then posing her question or conclusion – always a logical one, though. It had pissed the techno-optimists among their professors off to no end. _If_ this tech is going to move increasingly in the direction of self-automation, and _if_ it has a variety of practical applications in big industry, and _if_ there’s a general consensus that it is worth the investment, _then_ it’s going to threaten blue-collar jobs and cause some sort of employment and re-training crisis, obviously, so how are they going to prevent a repeat of the abuses that occurred in the _first_ industrial revolution? Things like that. Wicked problems that, once proposed, derailed the rest of the lesson. Olivia had become known as the doom prophet of their class. There were rumours that she’d narrowly avoided arrest at some of the protests she attended. May had seldom agreed _fully_ with Olivia’s solutions to the world’s problems, but the two had become close because of that, not in spite of it.

She remembers Liv asking her what she was reading one day in the graduate lounge back in the 80s:

… _And I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us_  
_which will we claim_  
_how will we go on living_  
_how will we touch, what will we know_  
_what will we say to each other_

She only shared a couple of the poems – skipped over the unnumbered one, felt the flush rising in her face even glancing over it – but she saw Liv later with her own copy of _Dream of a Common Language_ , and they made eye contact over the top of the pages, and neither of them looked away. They knew, and talking around the poems became how they talked about themselves; how May gave voice to the fact that she loved Ben, was attracted to him, but also to women. 

“Maybe in another life,” May had told Liv quietly.

\--

The only real sore spot between them, during their first years knowing each other, had been May’s ties through marriage to the military. Even after she explained it was her in-laws who were involved in overseas operations, not her, Liv hadn’t been able to keep a note of derision out of her tone when they talked about it over beers one night.

“I really don’t see how you can be okay with that.”

“Richard and Mary are perfectly lovely, and it’s a respectable job with benefits – including medical – and salary. _You,_ of all people, should understand that, right?”

Liv had shrugged. “Not if you’re going to be beholden to all that bullshit that comes with it. Doesn’t interest me. I want my own lab.”

That’d come as a surprise. “You won’t stay in academia? I thought you’d be a natural teacher.”

“Not if I can avoid it. The lack of structure is _killing_ me – all this work! Towards _what_? To spend the next decade slaving after tenure? No way. I want to set my own deadlines, but not like _this_. It’s exhausting. I’m going to find some private funding and work from there.” She’d reached out and taken May by the shoulder, face dipping close, and May’s head swam with Liv’s proximity. She’d chalked it up to the beer. “Plenty of scientists who get to do outreach as a part of their job, and there’s _such_ potential for an audience if you’re doing the cutting-edge kind of work. Right?”

May had swallowed hard. “You do love the spotlight.”

Liv had tilted her bottle towards May in a kind of salute, a cheeky grin on her face. “If I’m willing to stay in it, then people are less inclined to take a look at what I do behind the scenes.”

“You keep saying those kinds of things, and I’m never going to be able to let you out of my sight.”

“Is that a promise?”

Ben had asked how things went later that night. “I think she was flirting with me,” May said, while she’d chugged a huge glass of water.

“Oh?” he’d said, coming up behind her to wrap her in his arms.

“Mm. She’s had no luck with any of her activist girlfriends. One of them told her she was too much to handle _and_ not radical enough, right before breaking up with her.”

“That’s hard. You going to be okay with it?”

“I think so. I told her I wouldn’t put up with any comments she wouldn’t make to any other married woman, and she joked that didn’t exclude very much, but she’s eased off a lot. I think she’s just like that.”

“That’s good to hear. Just… you know, don’t put up with anything that makes you uncomfortable.”

May had turned around to kiss him and pointedly quirked an eyebrow. “Since when have I ever?”

He’d laughed.

So that had been that. May’d always known how lucky she was to get away with such a lack of drama, the things she’d heard from other people – queer or straight – about cheating, or messiness, or toxic jealousy. Liv had her outlets. May’d had Ben. But she’d talked things out with both Olivia and Ben, even when it made her skin crawl to bring things up, and May thought that might have been what made the difference.

\--

Then Peter comes along. Ben takes it the hardest of the two of them, and May has to bring the baby along to classes sometimes while he goes to work – it’s the end of her degree.

“What are you going to do?” asks Liv.

May has to stifle a yawn. “Raise him. As best we can. Hand me the dishrag, he’s teething.”

Liv fumbles out a partially frozen lump of cloth from the insulated bag May carries around with her everywhere now and hands it over. “That’s not what I meant.”

May glances at her sideways. “…About what?”

“Work. About your research.”

“It might have to get put on hold for a bit.”

Liv looks distraught at that. “That’s not even _close_ to fair–”

“Liv, my husband just lost his _brother and sister-in-law,_ and we’re the legal guardians of their _orphaned child_. I don’t think fairness has anything to do with it.” She bounces Peter in her arms, gently, his tiny face scrunched up.

Arms crossing, shrinking down into herself, Liv looks away.

“…Fine,” she says.

“I’m going to be okay, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I’m moving.”

This brings May up short. “What?”

“I landed the fellowship. It’s in California.”

“Oh.” May feels a lump rising in her throat. “C-congratulations.”

“They said there was a second position available. I told them about you. They wanted me to tell you to apply.” Liv’s voice is crisp, detached, lacking inflection. “Should I tell them you can’t?”

“That… might be for the best.”

Liv’s face relaxes just a fraction. She reaches over and brushes a thumb softly under May’s eye, rubbing away the tear starting to track its way down her cheek. “Hey. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. The people probably suck there. Bunch of hippies, so maybe I’ll fit in okay. Sunshine state? More like sunburn state. My complexion is gonna get fucked.”

May just nods, unable to really speak for a moment – then her voice surges, “Can you take him for a second?”

At this, Liv’s eyes widen. “Uh… I don’t really – what do I do?”

“Support his neck. Hold his head, body in the crook of the arm against the body; don’t drop him.”

Liv takes him gingerly from May’s arms, and May drops her face into her hands. She can feel her shoulders shaking for a few long, uncomfortable moments as she tries to get herself back under control. That’s just the problem. It’s not fair, not at all, not by a long shot. All the future she thought she’d planned is gone in an instant. All the possibilities she thought she’d had before her buckled in an instant, and now it feels like there’s only ever been this one path, this one option – she and Ben had never _wanted_ kids. And Liv has been a constant. But what else is she supposed to do? She doesn’t get to choose what happens in her life. She can bear this. She has to.

Her lungs burn inside her until she’s able to get her breathing back under control, and she rubs the tears away from her eyes like doing so will bring the feeling back to her fingers. She feels pressure on her side, and glances through her hands to see that Liv has shifted in and leaned against her.

“I’ll be back someday. I promise.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

But May leans back in despite herself, burying her face against Olivia’s shoulder. Back in her arms, Peter slowly starts to fall asleep.

\--

The first time they slept together, it was late fall, and around two decades since their commencement.

Peter worked in Olivia’s lab – in large part because of May asking Olivia if she had any positions for him, as a favour to an old friend. But they’d run into each other at the farmer’s market at some point – Liv picking over late-season tomatoes and fresh ears of corn – when she’d heard May’s voice over the crowd.

There’d been some banter regarding Liv’s appointment as head scientist, which May hadn’t gotten around to congratulating her for yet, and how was she doing? Their last phone call had been months ago. Olivia didn’t remember all the details – it was all bullshit small talk – but she had taken note of the deeper circles under May’s eyes, the edge in May’s voice that she only got when she forced herself to have conversational energy. The slight hunch of her shoulders. Liv had done some quick math and realized the anniversary of Ben’s death was coming up. For the last couple years, Liv had flown back out here around this time so that May wouldn’t have to be alone in the house while Peter was at school. It explained a lot about how May looked. She’d clutched the straps of her canvas grocery bags a little tighter, tried to sound nonchalant. “I have to go back to work – but do you want to come along? Guest pass, guaranteed.”

Around then the arms had been in their first full prototype, at least that much Liv could recall. The lab nevertheless had been a riot of wires and silicone, models and partly-assembled arrays and circuits and test pieces. Every square inch of every surface of the work room covered in something, with the more delicate pieces held in place by equally delicate metal pincers or clamps. There were posters on the wall and plexiglass windows covered in scrawling whiteboard markers, a low hum from the server room next door needed to power all the computers that told each proof-of-concept part what to do.

“You ever heard of giving the eye somewhere to rest?” May quipped, but Liv could hear the awe in her voice. Maybe the envy.

May started visiting a lot once they’d reconnected in person. First every other week; gradually up to every other day. Liv would collect her from the lobby and bring her back up, May hopping up on the last free counter when she got there and talking with Liv while she was on break. Sometimes she’d stay and work, connecting to Alchemax’s wifi, because Liv was always impatient to tug her goggles back down and hurry something to the fabrication room or run another debugging cycle on the code. But Liv slowly got used to having May around. It was like the old days. They talked about some of the books Liv had posted out, ones she’d bought for May from little shops in California – Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman, Audre Lorde. “Did they make you think of me?” Liv teased.

“Of course!” May had laughed, putting a hand on Liv’s shoulder, and Liv’s heart had skipped.

The season had worn on. The maples shifted tone until they were all an aching crimson. Liv kept getting leaves from them caught in her hair while she was biking to work, and May drew them out each day as they travelled up in the elevator. Liv watched May out of the corner of her eye and tried to intuit the exact number of seconds that May spent touching her, attempted to discern whether May was lingering or just kindly preventing her from looking more bedraggled than she already did.

She’d realized she hardly knew a thing about what May’s life was now, watching as the older woman closed her laptop and tucked it away inside a bag; so she asked.

“I’ve been able to start my own lab again,” May had replied. 

“ _Really?_ ” Liv’s mind had started racing – maybe Alchemax could draw up a small contract, something collaborative. “What’s the funding structure? The size?”

“Only really needs to be for me – small enough. Funding’s public.”

No amount of prying had been enough to get much more detail out of May after that, although she admitted that she was working primarily in material science: textile, to be specific; small-scale bespoke pieces. A bit of dabbling with practical assistive tech. It had irritated Olivia, a niggling little passing thought about how, of all the times to be _principled_ … For the millionth time she’d been glad that she was the authority in her own lab, that she ultimately enforced confidentiality however suited her. But May could be so stubborn when it came to things like this. So she’d changed the subject.

“It’s not right that I never see you outside of business hours,” Liv cracked, only partly joking.

“So have me over, then,”May replied.

It had been chill – the kind of day where all the New Yorkers were walking around in their wool peacoats and shivering because the wet had got into their bones and they were still adjusting. Liv invited May to the apartment for some ciders and barbeque jackfruit or something in the slow-cooker. Only, May had walked in and gave Liv her coat to hang up, cast an appreciative eye towards the kitchen and the half-prepped veggies on the cutting board, then walked Liv back into a wall with one hand pressed no-nonsense against her sternum.

“Can we?” May asked, a good foot between their faces, all electrified air that was seizing Liv’s breath up.

“God, yes–” Liv blurted.

“Thank God for that,” May muttered before leaning in, and _oh,_ her mouth on Liv’s was a revelation and then some. Warm, soft, a little chapped maybe but if they weren’t it’d be a surprise at this point in the season, and May moved her lips to Liv’s neck, and she nearly cracked her head into the wall. Her hands were on May’s shoulders – were they clenched? – and she wanted May to be everywhere already, the weight of her, _something,_ but it was gently uncompromising, agonizing, honey stings, electric syrup, the same body-fizzing excitement as the first time she got a neural synch to the suit. So much slower than she expected. So much kinder for all that May was insistent, her hands skimming down Liv’s sides until they came to rest against her hips and pressed into them, pinning her down. Liv was shot through with _craving_ , so much sensation it was nearly overload. And once May started mouthing words directly against her skin –

“It’s been a while. Sorry if I’m rusty.”

Liv choked out a laugh that turned into a moan, tilting her head back to give May better access. “You’re plenty enthusiastic from where I’m standing--”

“Yeah, well…” May leaned back enough that Liv could see the crow’s feet crinkled at the corners of her eyes. “Didn’t figure you’d be staying that way long. Might’ve been presumptuous.”

“Educated, more like.” Liv took a shaky breath then said, “Can I kiss you back?”

“ _Absolutely_.”

She was alive, solid, warm; and for once, Liv found herself around someone who hadn’t been afraid to ask for what she wanted, which made it easier to do the same.

\--

They’re together for a long time.

A few years in the early 2010s that are a blur, seasons melting together – a timelapse, sped-up, of Liv going to work in the morning and coming back home to get some food going, May showing up a few hours later. They watch bad movies. They read books from the university press, alternative magazines, op-eds, anything they can get their hands on, and then they talk for ages about it. It teaches them to listen to each other. Liv gains an appreciation for the way that May tabulates her points, the way that she addresses multiple parts of a complex argument through her responses, how she often prompts Liv with a question. It makes Liv feel like May cares about what she has to think, and she relishes the chance to say something mildly outlandish because she knows May will lift an eyebrow and say, “Alright, explain.”

Olivia’s long diatribes against big pharma, Monsato, the military-industrial complex… all are humoured by May, and though they don’t solve anything in the course of speaking about it, Liv always feels like the snarl of thoughts in her head gets a little more untangled every time. May shows her photos of the beehives and urban farms in Detroit, pamphlets for the hacker collectives unlocking farm equipment in the Midwest. It helps, a little.

May is around when Liv makes her final demonstration of the tech at the innovation summit, listening to the gasps of the crowd as her intern raises up off the stage, borne by four slowly uncoiling limbs. Liv feels May take her hand, and she stands a little taller, a little prouder. Liv is around when Peter finishes his stint in her lab, shaking his hand while May blinks away a sudden shine to her eyes. May invites her along when he and MJ get married. 

She lets May take her to a local greenhouse, one that raises all their plants from seeds recovered from the previous year’s, and they pick out a few things that will do well in balcony pots; Liv loves having something to dedicate attention to, something growing and tender and verdant, even if they’ll only last the season.

Liv splays herself along the couch, and May nestles in between her legs, rests her head against Liv’s chest and reads to them both – creative non-fiction, excerpts from the student writing group that May volunteers for, poetry.

“ _I would like to give you the silver branch, the small white flower, the one word that will protect you from the grief at the center of your dream,”_ May reads; Liv tilts her head back, allows May’s voice to wash over her, until inevitably the book is closed, May turns over, and lets her fingers run over Liv’s scalp to take purchase in her hair, kissing her long and languid.

“You’re one of the only _really_ good people in the world,” Liv murmurs against May’s lips, and May presses in closer.

It feels so _greedy_ , the hunger they keep between them. They’re wise enough at this stage of their lives, any awkwardness about talking logistics left decades behind them – about physical comfort, about angles and support, about how to prop themselves and each other up without pulling a muscle or getting a cramp. A slower flare – deeper, maybe, taking a bit longer and more persistent of a buildup than it used to need before, but _delicious_.

Liv loves to have May beside her, grasping at her back or her arms, holding on for purchase while Liv’s hands move – clever and deft, determined to coax out whimpered sounds and words – _yes_ , _keep going, like that, a little slower, keep going–_

It’s agreed to keep things away from the house, so Peter doesn’t find out too much of what his aunt gets up to.

They don’t have sex with the suit involved until later – after Liv re-appropriates the asset once her lab’s bid is passed over for another, less unpredictable soft-body robotic. And after she scares off the corporate dipshits who commissioned it from pursuing a lawsuit. The payoff is phenomenal once they experiment a little. She loves the nights when May wants to be held in place or borne up by Liv’s extra arms – so much an extension of her own body and will, at this point, and it takes some pressure off of both of them. She loves seeing May’s hair splayed across a pillow, tracing her fingertips down May’s face to see her smile, loves when May presses open-mouthed kisses to her hands before pushing Liv down against the mattress, whispering, “ _Your turn._ ”

Olivia loves this, the desire and pleasure that they hold between them, though it doesn’t escape her notice that May never lets her get away with anything on the days after Doc Ock starts getting attention in the news. No time for that to be a secret between them – May had been around through the tech’s development, after all, and called Liv on it almost immediately. Her disapproval was _glaringly_ clear, even when Liv exasperatedly told her a _little_ of what she’d been doing. There was always an angle, after all. So what if it had a hint of indiscretion to it? Liv was good at explaining the rationale. If _she_ stole the documents, it meant _that asshole_ didn’t, blah blah blah. May wasn’t impressed with her methods or with her destructiveness.

May was lying curled against Liv’s side one night, spent and both of them coming down, so the conversation was softened by the endorphins when Liv asked May why she stuck around if it bothered her so much. Liv wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or impressed at how straightforward May was with her answer.

“Being around you… it’s _exhilarating_. And you know I care about you. You also know you’re…intense. And opportunistic. Those can be good traits, mind – they draw me in, even though you put them to poor use.”

“Don’t spare my feelings any.”

“You wanted to know.” May turns over and stretches. “ _They are simply doing, from the deepest spurs of their being, what they are impelled to do every summer; and so, dear sorrow, are you._ Plus I feel better this way. Like I’m keeping an eye on you.”

“Mmhmm. Do you really think that only goes one way?”

May returns to facing Liv, before sighing and draping an arm back along Liv’s side. She traces a line down from the hollow of Liv’s throat to where her heart lies and back up again, resting her palm there skin-to-skin.

“Of course not. I appreciate it.”

\--

Some bad times happened, of course.

Like one morning, waking up and getting dressed and turning on the news to see footage of Doc Ock ripping a set of windows off the side of a skyscraper, with Spider-Man (Peter) swinging around the side and getting hurled away by one of the arms (that’s Peter) before Doc Ock (Liv) wiped a bit of blood away from her face (that explained the bruising) and scuttled away. The footage from the helicopter freezing on the still image of Liv’s predatory grin, one of the mechanical arms nothing more than a blur in the foreground. The crew got caught up in webbing before they hit the ground, the reporter said, and that’s all that May caught before she stormed out, her heartbeat thudding in her ears.

May had to handle the fallout of that one, and it made her nauseous for days – it was the first real time that Spider-Man and Doc Ock had engaged in a fight, and Peter took her to the side when she was over at his and MJ’s place for dinner. He obviously hadn’t wanted to talk about it, but he met her, gaze and she appreciated the guts it took to do that as he asked her whether she was aware of what her friend Liv was up to these days. It made her want to sink through the floor and die, and she’d left it at a tactful but short, “keeping tabs on it, yes.” He’d told her to be careful, and hadn’t pressed her on it.

What was worse was how nonchalant she had to stay as she asked Liv what the hell she’d been doing. Liv’d shrugged, said something about needing to hack a mainframe, acquisitions of satellite data, gaining leverage, only then Spider-Man had interfered, and that’s when the property damage became an element… halfway through the monologue, it dawned slowly on May that Liv had _no idea_ who Spider-Man was.

The second, more immediate thought that she’d had was that there were _no circumstances_ under which she wanted Liv to gain that knowledge.

She’d called off their dinner plans.

Liv said it was fine, they’d just reschedule.

She’d spent that night without sleeping, in the lab in her backyard, feverishly testing the latest samples of Peter’s new suits to make sure they wouldn’t tear, that they could stand up better against stabbing motions, against grappling, all the while thinking back on all the nights she and Liv had spent together – how futile it was for May to think about breaking the grip of Liv’s extra arms, and Liv had been _gentle_.

It got to a point shortly after those horrible conversations where May decided to deliberately avoid newspapers, the television, the radio on certain days – she started penciling in time that she knew she’d be occupied by work or volunteering, instead of immersing herself fully in what was happening in the broader world. May hated when the stories roused no reaction in her – crimes in the street, another setback in a court case, a still image of a child in need, a victim impact statement, and _she felt nothing_.

Her therapist told her at their bi-monthly meeting there was nothing wrong with giving herself some breathing space to recharge; that was how one avoided burnout. Go for a walk. Interact with art. Do things that make you feel human, that make you feel connected. Help somebody. May signed up to mentor at 826NYC. 

She read Mary Oliver: _The Buddha’s Last Instruction_ , _The Journey_ , _Strawberry Moon_ , _The Swimming Lesson, Acid_. The words all jumbled together as her eyes started to burn. _Clearly I’m not needed, yet I feel myself turning into something of inexplicable value…“mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop…_ _and should anyone be surprised if sometimes, when the white moon rises, women want to lash out with a cutting edge?... How to put off, one by one, dreams and pity, love and grace,_ – _how to survive in any place... Insult and anger, the great movers._

May wondered what people thought of her, an old woman sitting on a bench in the park and crying over poetry, immobile. 

\--

Liv heaves herself up and slips onto the roof of her apartment, past caring whether anyone’s seen her; her time perception is _fucked_ , minutes dripping and oozing, and it takes too long to fumble an oversized shirt and loose pants out of the emergency clothing stash she keeps up here. Olivia finds her eyes darting around the surrounding buildings, panting breath loud in her own ears and listening for the telltale _thwips_ of web landing on a surface. Nothing. Coast is clear.

She’s glad she left the window open, although she topples some of her potted plants on the way in; the clay shatters, dirt spilling out, and it’s just _one more thing_ she’s going to have to tend to later. To the fridge, where she fumbles a pack of frozen edamame out, how are _those_ the only goddamn vegetables she has in the place, slaps it against the swelling on her jaw. Instant relief. She reaches up to touch the webbing adhered to her hair and hisses when even that simple motion makes the bones in her shoulders grind together, the sensation sharp and bright - might have pulled something after all, _shit_. For the fifth time tonight she counts herself lucky that the arms could compensate for the rest of her, or else she’d be trussed up waiting for the cops.

A clatter behind her, in the living room.

She’s whirling to face it, leaping before she’s aware, watching herself do it, cloth shredding behind her, one arm arching like a hissing snake ready to strike and a second darting out, the final two propelling her at an astonishing speed - May shrieks, topples, falling backwards over the coffee table, _shit_ , the darting arm moving now to wrap instead of pierce, pulling May up before she can impact.

Liv isn’t so lucky. She grits her teeth and pushes herself up from where she skidded against the ground, pain flaring renewed through her face and neck. May is wheezing, Olivia realizes, tilting her head up a fraction and glaring forward to see that May’s hands are pushing at the arm compressing her ribs. She’s overcompensated in her panic. She makes sure May will land on the ground gently and releases all the arms at once, retracting them.

“ _Jesus_ _Christ,_ May - how did you-?”

“A neighbour recognized me,” May gasps, “And let me in - oh _Liv,_ what _happened_ to--”

“ _Don’t touch me,”_ Liv snarls, and May, who had been reaching out to her, flinches back. Liv plants a hand on the ground and another on her knee, wincing as she stands, and limps back to grab the makeshift ice-pack.

She hears May get up, the creak of springs as she sits on Olivia’s couch.

“What happened to you?”

Liv gestures at her hair without bothering to turn around; she doesn’t want May to see what happened to her face until she can compose herself. “What does it look like?”

“... Spider-Man?”

“ _Yep_.” Liv forces herself to take a few steadying breaths. Then it clicks. “ _Shit._ We’d had plans, didn’t we.”

When May speaks again, it’s with a note of reproach. “I really don’t think that’s the issue we should be focusing on here…”

“ _Fuck._ This night is a catastrophe.”

She braces herself against her table, turns around. Tries to assemble a look of calm apology on her face, but from May’s expression it’s not working.

“If this is what you look like,” May says coolly, “what condition is Spider-Man in?”

 _Seriously?_ Liv can feel a curl unbidden at the corner of her mouth, a sneer. She’s narrowly evaded being caught, this is the closest she’s ever gotten; there was a breach, and she has _no idea_ how Spider-Man knew what the layout of her lab was; she’s going to have to get IT out of bed on a weekday night so they can start scrubbing her servers for whatever data or schematics might have been accessed. And she _hurts_! And May is worried about the _webslinger?_

“I’d expect a little more sympathy.” A horrible, icy, instinctual ping in the back of her mind. “Why do you care about Spider-Man, anyway?”

May isn’t budging, the set of her jaw and her eyes stubborn. “Did it _never_ occur to you that if he’s taken an interest, it means you _might_ have something to reconsider in the choices you’ve been making?”

Not this conversation again. Liv scrapes a chair out and collapses into it. “Stop avoiding the _question_ , May --”

“I’m not _avoiding_ anything!”

“Yes you are!”

“Because it’s the _right thing,_ Olivia!”

Olivia glares back, trying to convey as much fury and hurt as she can, and is gratified when May breaks first; closes her eyes and sighs, furrowing her brow and getting up. She’s expecting May to get up and leave, to slam the door behind her. It’d almost be a relief, so that Liv can do what needs doing, and have a shower, and collapse into bed and wake up tomorrow feeling _better_. But instead, May approaches. Her brows are set, and there’s a frown etched across every part of her face, and the moonlight turns her almost into a statue, and again there’s a nasty ping in the back of Liv’s mind -- that this is it, this is finally the last straw for May, she’s pushed it too far…

Liv watches May reach out and take her chin in her hands, gently tilting her head up. She inspects Olivia’s face, narrows in on the contusions rising; presses in lightly at the base of Olivia’s skull and along the neck and upper shoulders, noticing when Olivia hisses in reaction. Olivia lets it happen, wrestling against the urge to reject what May’s doing.

“I don’t think any of this is too serious,” May relents. “But let me check you over to make sure nothing’s broken.”

Olivia breathes out, a long exhausted rattle and then reaches out for May’s waist. May resists for a split second, and then lets Olivia reel her in; Liv feels her step closer, and lets her head drop forward to rest against May’s front. May pats Olivia’s head, and then _tsks_ as her hair sticks to May’s hand.

“You’re lucky I know how to get this stuff out,” she says, and Olivia laughs even though it makes her ribs hurt.

\--

On bad days, May turns the memories of their fights over in her mind over, and over, and over -- a near-obsessive loop. One: Liv saying something callous and cold, in that offhand rapid-fire affect of hers, and May blowing up at her before she can stop herself.

“You need to stop seeing people as _abstractions_!”

Worse things than that. She just knew that at one point, Liv’s face crumpled and twisted.

That bit about people as abstractions hadn’t been fair. It felt true while saying it, necessary, but May did enough generalizing about strangers herself – she didn’t often leave New York. Lived here. Worked here. Even people in other states felt unreal sometimes. The populations of other countries? Even more so. The subway – a mass of faces, hurried people, no one’s story accessible, and so all of what May could imagine about their lives a conjecture. Imagined.

But she _tried_ to think about who they were, what they might need. At times she doubted that Liv ever bothered.

She still apologized.

Yet another memory: May had been furious, brandished a newspaper on which Liv was front-and-center on the full-splash photo on page 1, the remnants of several armoured cars shredded across a good span of the Brooklyn bridge and smoke swelling into the air. 

“Don’t you _dare_ moralize at me,” Liv spat.

“There was a school bus on that bridge! There were _kids_ that almost got hurt because of you –”

She’d heard Liv laughing, the sound shrill to her ears. “Oh, okay, how is _anything_ I do objectively worse than what’s already happening in the world? _Look around, May_.”

“You don’t have to make it worse–”

“Make it worse? It’s almost as bad as it can get! So I liberate some nuclear equipment. So what? Anti-proliferation this, accord that, none of it means shit – you know it, I know it, everyone knows it except the people too scared or too stupid to realize that every world power is saying one thing and scrambling in the background to do another. We’re a warmonger’s word away from everything going wrong, and at least you know _I’ve_ got it and not _them_ – _”_

 _“_ Who made _you_ supreme arbiter of good judgment?”

“Like I said, don’t moralize at me just because you don’t want to get your hands dirty.” Liv had growled. “I’m doing what I think I have to. You disagree? Fine. But don’t try to make me feel bad about it, because I _don’t._ I’m not the one _squandering_ myself _._ ”

After every fight they smoked together in angry silence on the balcony of Liv’s apartment until they weren’t angry anymore.

\--

There’d been a day, shortly after Peter got married, that Liv tossed out a theoretical – maybe May should consider moving somewhere else – and what stuck for May was how she’d reacted when May laughed about it.

“Why would I?” May waved her off. “We paid off the mortgage years ago. Where would I even go?”

It wasn’t just the lab in her backyard; although, she did think about that. What she hadn’t said: too many memories in the walls, too much history, the weight of every choice she’d make. Moving away would feel like an admission of failure; although, May wasn’t quite sure what she would have failed at.

She’d kept walking along the pathway, casting her eyes down towards her feet and looking at all the maple seeds, the earthy smell of decaying leaves rising up around them, before realizing Liv had stopped. She’d turned back, and seen Liv staring back at her with incredulity and pain in her eyes. Shadows cast across her face by all the trees, their browning leaves rustling in a chill wind.

And May realized what Liv had probably meant, but Liv laughed it off, sounding brittle, and wouldn’t re-open the conversation.

\--

A few more turbulent years go by that way – they never quite get resolution, because how do you resolve something that neither of you knows how to change? All their arguments ultimately slanted along one of a few themes – worn conversational grooves cutting along every incompatibility in their values. There was Liv’s aggressive lack of remorse, pitted against May’s judgemental attitude. Then there were the accusations about which of them had sold out: Liv, who went corporate, her ascension to notoriety funded by the highest bidder with the fewest regulations, or May, who went military after all? It came down to a matter of freedom versus conventionality. Liv wouldn’t trade her freedom for anything, she figured.

The Fisk job is the only one Liv keeps entirely hidden, once she knows what he’s after – he’s the one who approaches Alchemax with funding, a benefactor. He’d paid attention to her specific research interests and then made her an offer. It’s too risky for May to know – but mainly, she’d insist that Liv do something about it, and well… the interest convergence is too worthwhile to ignore.

Maybe it causes her a pang now and then when she sees how many messages are in her voicemail, but then for a long while, she’s too preoccupied to do much about it.

She’ll make it up to May later.

\--

Liv calls the night it happens, and May doesn’t pick up her phone.

Liv calls again, and May turns her phone off, barely resisting the urge to hurl it across the room.

Liv comes by, and May throws the door open so hard it dents the paint on the doorframe that Peter helped her redo last summer and that Ben refinished 15 years ago, oh _Peter,_ and May Parker hits Olivia in the chest over and over and over again while Liv gently backs her into the house, closes the door behind them, and locks it. She takes all of it – the suit she wears under her clothing absorbing and redistributing the energy from the blows. May punches until her arms ache and she splits open the skin on one of her knuckles, and then cries. She didn’t know she had so many tears in her. Olivia just holds her and doesn’t say anything, except, “I know why you didn’t tell me.” Neither one mentions Olivia looking her up.

\--

Dr. Olivia Octavius watches as Fisk slurps food into his mouth and manages to keep her face carefully neutral, no matter how gross it is. Tombstone is in the background, near the door leading back into Alchemax’s lab from the outdoor patio, a useless lunk, sneering at her, so she refuses to make eye contact at all; he’s little more than hired muscle, and she doesn’t have energy to waste on a power play.

“How’s it comin’ along?” he says around a mouthful of food, and Liv forces herself to smile pleasantly, all the while imagining his face turning purple, one or two of her extra arms at his throat _squeezing_.

“We’re still processing the data from the explosion.”

“Work faster. I wanna know if we had any success at all making contact.”

She resists the urge to roll her eyes. “I’ll see what we can do.”

Liv crosses her legs and looks out over the sprawling river valley below. He’s wiping his fingers on a large cloth napkin, now, and one of her staffers comes up with a grimace to take the plates away. She makes a mental note to give the poor sap an extra hour of pay for needing to put up with this. Or at the very least, a cafeteria voucher.

“What about the side-job I gave you?”

“To find Parker?” she says lightly – although, she feels the suit she wears under her clothing start to hum to life as her heart rate kicks up a few beats per minute, as a prickle runs down her spine. “No luck. She’s not exactly in the phone book, or if she is, there’s a few thousand Parkers in New York. And it looks like someone wipes the digital records that could be used to trace her location.”

It’d been a laughably simple script to write and execute. 

Fisk grunts.

“Set the Prowler on it.”

That won’t do at all. Liv sweetens her voice, speaks low and lulling the way that seems to placate Fisk and make him receptive to what she’s saying.

“He’s otherwise preoccupied – the priority still needs to be to find the kid. However he got that data drive, he’s our most pressing threat.”

Fisk shoots a glance out of the corner of his eye at Tombstone, and she wonders for a second if he’s thinking of sending _him_ out to try and track May down – she has to suppress a giggle, good fucking luck with that – but then it looks like he thinks better of it.

“Well? Get back to the collider, then. You’ve got work to do.”

Olivia stands, gives a mock salute, shoves her hands in the pockets of her lab coat, and brushes past Tombstone without a second glance behind her. As soon as she knows she’s out of sight, she lets a vicious, nervous half-smile curl onto her lips. Her nails dig into the palms of her hands, and she presses harder until it hurts.

\--

Days pass.

May sees them leaving gifts on her lawn, so many strangers – cards, and toys, and thank you notes, the shrine in front of her house echoing the one she saw at his gravesite. Around the time that the mass starts creeping onto her sidewalk and getting blanketed with snow is when she dully realizes that she needs to do something about it. There are some boxes in the basement, she remembers, and so she hauls one up and takes it outside and starts picking up each item, one by one, and looking at them before putting them away. Her breath is freezing into her eyelashes, hours going by, and the sun is already low in the sky by the time she sees a blue shadow approaching.

“Can I help?” says Liv, so soft it almost gets lost.

She can’t look up. “Don’t you dare throw anything out.”

Liv crouches in the snow next to her, her face almost lost inside the massive scarf she’s wearing. She takes a card out of May’s gloved hands. “You should go inside for a bit. It’s cold out here.”

“No.”

They work in silence for a time.

“Did you see it happen?” May finally asks, the words wrenching out of her.

“ _No_ ,” Liv snarls defensively, then thinks better of her tone. “But I – it happened at a research site. At my research site.”

Liv looks up sharply – May sees the stony look on her face – then passes over a stuffed toy that she’s holding, and breaks eye contact first.

“Will you tell me where?”

“Can’t.”

A beat.

“Well, that’s that, I guess.” May jerks the box away and stomps inside.

Liv follows, and May hears the door clap shut. “It’s _proprietary knowledge_. I can’t tell you, you _know_ I can’t _–”_

“Oh, give me a break, _Olivia_!”

“It’s for your own protection –”

“ _Bullshit_ ,” she explodes, “that’s _bullshit,_ Dr. _Octavius_ , you know where every secret of mine is stored – I don’t have anywhere to hide! I do my research at my _goddamn house_ , you don’t talk to me for months and now you’ve shown up on my doorstep even though I told you _never_ to do that, and you won’t even do me the justice of telling me where my nephew _died_ so that I can _do something about it-_!”

“And what are you going to do about it, May?”

This response voiced low, carefully neutral. There are furious tears welling up in May’s eyes again, she can feel them, and she’s so angry at how she always wears her heart on her sleeve right where Liv can stab it, and she’s angrier at how Liv never does.

Sometimes she thinks the world could buckle around her because of the work Liv is doing, that everything might one day get collapsed into a black hole or shattered by a paradox because of a project of her brilliant, insane… _whatever she is_ , partner or rival or enemy. She holds this thought with half her mind – that what Liv is doing is always illegal, unethical, reckless – and with the other half holds the thought that there’s never been a personal loss suffered that Liv hasn’t witnessed and supported her through. That they’ve always known when to hold something back so the other doesn’t shatter, regardless of the world events playing backdrop. That maybe May is what’s keeping other people safe. Small comfort.

“You know what your problem is?” she finally manages, not looking at Olivia. “A total loss of your fucking perspective.”

Liv looks at the wall, at the photos of Peter and May and Ben that are there. At the photo of Mary and Richard Parker’s wedding, a baby in their arms. She sighs, short and sharp, and tugs her scarf down from around her face so May can see the miserable line of her mouth.

“Look. I can’t replace them, any of them. I know that, and I know people who don’t believe that – who would rather break the multiverse than admit that it’s true – and I don’t want you to become one of those people.”

She waits, like she expects May to say something. When there’s nothing, she continues.

“I liked Peter–”

“Don’t you _dare_ talk about him.”

“Fine. I won’t, then. Just… believe me when I say I didn’t do it, and I know the person who did will _never_ get what they want. And promise me you won’t do anything stupid.” She steps forward. “Can I – can I touch you?”

May knows she should say no. But it’s been a hard few days, and there’s a pile of undone dishes in her sink from all the casseroles her neighbours have been sending over, and the sun is setting outside, and May is so _tired_. So instead, she nods.

And Liv reaches out, and takes the box from her hands, sets it on the floor. And she steps in, and then May is wrapped in Liv’s arms, lightly enough that she knows she can pull away, if she wants. But she doesn’t.

Liv holds her tighter.

“ _Promise me,_ ” Olivia urges, even though they both know they can’t promise anything.

\--

May had always been a very private person. Even when they were back in school together, she wouldn’t let Liv come over, but showed off a couple of pictures – the garden, mostly. Liv could savour it in her mind’s eye – every plant lush and rooted, the soil rich with compost from the bin in the corner of the yard, the hum of pollinators, the squirm of happy decomposers, all the time and energy and care it took to cultivate. The details had faded, but Liv remembers now how it had felt to be around the older woman – like all the noise in her brain grew quiet and ordered, for once. Like May had access to some secret that was always elusive, always out of Liv’s reach; like the epiphany she spent her life chasing the high of would nestle down at the centre of her life, and could stay there, if she just stayed close enough to May…

Foolish thoughts.

Appealing, but empty. It had already been too late for that, she reflected, by the time Ben was murdered. And by the time she understood why May had enforced distance, kept up barriers, Peter Parker – Spider-Man – was also dead.

The heartbreak of what they could have had was somewhere far behind them, but at intervals: a rupture, all their past and present selves collapsing down. Liv and May’s lives impacting at random until at some point they both gave in and grudgingly accepted that they would never get away from each other. All the reasons Liv hadn’t quit or walked away, all the reasons May did… they just fed into each other. Amplified. Self-reinforced. They argued about their principles all the time, but Liv couldn’t conceive of her life without them, just as she couldn’t explain why her next steps were always so obvious, why she was compelled to follow through.

Liv needs more time to stabilize the collider _until_ she sees three Spider-people, the exultant shock of it slicing through all of her defenses, and then… well, when Fisk’s first replacement family dies from the terminal condition of being in the wrong dimension, she knows at least two more where that came from – and more importantly, she knew she was _right!_

The multiverse is now officially established as reality. With the appearance of the Spider-people, her deadline just got even more squashed, even if keeping Fisk mollified was laughably easy – he thought no one was capable of lying to him, and that 24 hours was a pressure cooker. Idiot. He’d clearly never coped with grad school deadlines. She had been ready to stall until Peter B. Parker turned up; now, it’s _infinitely_ more important to just run the supercollider experiment and let it fail, again, and again, as many times as possible before the Spidies blow the whole thing up in her face. She knows if she can prolong data collection, both from the collider and from any subjects who make their way through, she’ll be able to figure out why cellular disintegration happens. How to counteract the process, or inoculate against it. Don’t sleep on the research, like any of her funders or the government of this corrupt country would. There’s no point reasoning with the Spiders – they’d never give her a shot to do _anything –_ but it’s a damn shame the other Peter got away. He wasn’t the real one. She could’ve gotten a lot from observations alone. Maybe to understand the condition. Maybe enough to do something about it, so that when interdimensional travel becomes _a thing_ that every global power races towards without adequate preparation, Liv could reduce the body-count in the long run.

May would call that unconscionable.

Liv calls it math, the same kind that keeps her in an apartment she could live in ten times over on her stipend, if she didn’t spend all her money on pet projects and urban vegetarianism.

\--

May thinks she’s taking this all this business with the extra Spider-people rather well, although this wasn’t exactly what she had in mind when she told people she had an open-door policy.

“You look tired, Peter,” she’d said. She wonders how she’d looked to him.

Even so, May watches Miles, unsure of himself, struggling, surrounded by allies and grappling with the clear but awful choices lying in front of them, and she realizes:

 _Ah. This is his story now_.

It’s the most profoundly liberating thought she’s had in years.

\--

Of _course_ the kid fucks it up.

Liv knows it the second the Prowler comes onto the channels, calling her and everyone else to an address she’d know anywhere, where he’d followed that _boy_ they’ve been hunting for days, and Liv curses viciously even as she shucks the outer layers of what she’s wearing and lets the arms unfurl behind her.

She’s calculating everything as she flies along, willing her mind to go faster than she’s travelling. They’re all going to be there, Scorpion and Tombstone and Prowler – shit, is Fisk going to come too? Focus, focus, think – unbidden, accusations that May has hurled at her come crashing into her mind, how this was unsustainable, how someone was going to get hurt; stop, that’s not productive, how the _fuck_ to play this? What can she do? There’s got to be something. She laughs to herself, feeling cold air sting as it rushes past her face, because well, at least she can ring the doorbell. Whatever happens after that isn’t her fault. There are too many elements at play. Too many factors. Liv realizes that this is the _one time_ in her life she hasn’t been able to think her way out of something. The _damn_ Spiders, so many of them, a fucking infestation, they’re in her _way_ , and now she’s going to have to take care of it…

It’s not her fault.

\--

May is emerging with tea from her kitchen when the front door slams open, the doorframe shattering where the handle had been, and everything plunges from her hands. She barely hears the china shatter, because there she is in the doorway – already sipping delicately, looking around, her arms coiling around and spilling into the living room.

“Cute place. Real homey,” Doc Ock says, too bright, unhinged-sounding, and May can’t see her eyes at all behind the goggles, and she’s is resolutely looking _everywhere_ but May.

“Oh great, it’s _Liv_ ,” she hears herself saying, already reaching for a baseball bat, her adrenaline flooding, her fingers going numb and vision narrowing; and it occurs to her that everything between them has always led here, or something like it, eventually. The other villains that came with Liv start to converge on May’s living room, and that’s about the time that all hell breaks loose.

\--

A near-apocalyptic seismic shift, only a few hours later, and then it’s done.

Everything hurts, and Liv doesn’t know where else to go. So of course, she goes home.

Except May’s house is dark, covered with police tape, tarps flapping like spirits over the gaping maw of her front walls and the roof, and the broken splinters from the doorframe catch on Liv’s hands as she slips to the ground.

That’s how May finds her, when she comes by to pick up some more of her things.

Her first thought is broken ribs, but for all that the arms are malfunctioning – twitching, occasionally roiling in spasms – it seems like the torso shielding on the suit managed to redirect the worst of whatever caused this into the robotics themselves. The back of the suit is a horrific mangle. The blood caked down her face is from a few shallow cuts. One lens of her goggles is shattered. May realizes Liv probably had to drag herself here unassisted, and that feels like cold water all through her.

Somehow, she gets Liv back to the temporary safe house she’s put up in without getting pulled over – a miracle considering how fast she drives to get there. She’s lucky every enforcement officer is preoccupied near the remnants of Fisk Tower, lucky that they all know better than to argue with the woman who raised Spider-Man when she tells them she’s capable of taking care of herself. When May peels Liv’s gloves off, followed by the rest of the suit – inch by anguished inch – she can see deep bruises printed down the entirety of her left side. She manages to drag Liv up the stairs, get her cleaned up, does the ABCs and an inspection for spinal trauma, wraps her in blankets, drops her off in the spare bedroom in the recovery position, and resolves not to leave her alone until she’s _sure_ she’s stable, then to check in every thirty minutes. Or every ten. Or something.

First, though, she sits at the head of the bed, with Liv’s head cradled in her lap, and she sobs. 

\--

Hours pass.

Liv wakes up, and she’s ravenous, and her face hurts like a motherfucker. _She_ hurts like a motherfucker.

She looks across the room and sees May sitting in a chair, dozing. Her head dropped to her chest, an open book in her hand.

There’s already bandages on the areas that need them. And what feels like ice packs pressed to an arm, to her side, to one of her thighs, a few layers of blankets as a barrier between.

She starts to stir, and May blinks awake.

They stare at each other for a little while, then May yawns.

“Welcome back to the living.”

“How long’s it been?” Her voice comes out a croak.

“Nearly two days. You woke up now and again. Are you lucid, this time?”

Liv grunts. Every breath in and out, her ribs throb. She wishes she could pass out on command, but no such luck.

“I must’ve had pretty shitty dreams.”

May softens. “They didn’t sound too bad. You said some things.”

“Did I confess my undying love?” Only it comes out sounding serious, and she’s _really_ glad May lets the sentence hang. Liv coughs a little, wincing.

“You’re lucky, you know. We all are, from the sounds of it. Whatever you tried didn’t work, which is probably for the benefit of New York. Not to mention this plane of existence.”

“I’ve been awake less than four minutes and you’re already lecturing me,” Liv says peevishly.

“… I’m just glad you’re awake.”

This in a voice small enough that Liv tries to sit up, which is a mistake. She settles back, glances around, but it’s a horribly anonymous room for all that it’s peaceful. Liv remembers what she did to May’s house and winces. There’s gentle light, the soft tick of a manual clock, a tree dappling shadows across part of the bedspread. A dresser, a bookshelf, a bedside table with medication bottles at the ready, a glass of water, antibiotic ointment.

May clears her throat. “We’ll talk about… your exit plan when you’re ready to. What you want to do. How you need to handle it.”

“What are they saying about what happened?”

“Not now.” Liv groans, but May narrows her eyes. “Once you can get up on your own again, then maybe we’ll talk. Or you can read it on your phone yourself. It’s up to you.”

“… Yeah, no, later. Fuck, I’m not gonna be able to bike for months.” She stops and thinks for a second. “…Are you leaving?”

May has been getting up, setting her book down. “Just to make some coffee. Breakfast.”

Before she walks out, she crosses to Liv and brushes some of the hair out of her eyes. Her hand lingers, then withdraws.

Liv spends a long time staring at the ceiling.

\--

Convalescence nearly drives her crazy, and it doesn’t help that she gets left behind on the days when there are people helping May patch the hole in her roof, or the holes in her wall, or any of the other issues. Liv asks how she can help, and May pointedly notes that Liv could contribute towards the financials, if she really insists. Liv puts yoga videos on her phone and nearly cries her way through them as she starts to stretch out limbs that are still mottled with healing bruises. May buys her a yoga ball – and a stand for it to rest on so it doesn’t run the risk of rolling away while Liv learns to reclaim her balance. She spots Liv for some of the exercises.

The tension between them starts to noticeably lessen the first time May quips about flexibility, and even more so once Liv self-consciously apologizes about what she did. May reproachfully says it comes with the territory, and that stings. Liv limps around the neighbourhood a couple of times, propped up on May’s arm; every day, she’s able to get a little further than the one before. Liv reads almost every book on the closest of the shelves, and then returns to a couple that had something to them. The language, maybe. The nesting of the stories within the stories, or the images within the poems. She keeps coming back to the dog-eared copy of Adrienne Rich:

_The eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and death ___  
_and the lips part and say:_ I mean to go on living?  
_Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream_  
_or in this poem,_ There are no miracles?

____

____

Olivia starts to wonder if there’s something she’s been missing out on, something she should have known all this time.

“I don’t understand why you’re helping me.”

“Don’t insult me.”

“I _really_ fucked up your house, May. You’d be within your rights to kick me out.”

“… I’m rebuilding it.”

When she’s able, Olivia comes along to the construction site, wrapped in an oversized woolen coat, shrouding the tangle of her hair in a scarf, staring into the half-broken house, looking at what she’s done. If May notices her start to cry, she mercifully doesn’t say.

\--

May moves the TV to the bedroom so Liv can ease the boredom, and on it, Liv watches the news, sometimes. Reads the long-form articles when the paper shows up. Fisk’s refusing to talk, for now, but who knows how long that’ll last, or what will happen after that. She should think about a plea bargain. She should think about skipping town. There’s that kid, the one who beat the crap out of her and Fisk and the rest, webslinging through the streets – and she’s stuck at home. Infuriating! The inertia might kill her even if the truck couldn’t. She recognizes some of the tech on the kid’s wrists, confronts May about it.

“His name is Miles,” says May, all serene. “He’s doing well for himself these days.”

“Tch. Menace.”

“A delight. He’s smart. He says he watched some of your educational movies in science class and that it’s real weird that you’re Doc Ock, actually.”

“Does he know I’m here?”

“Not yet.”

“It’s a miracle of science!”

“A miracle of discretion.”

A few moments pass, the clips changing to something going on with the stock markets, and then Liv groans.

“I hate feeling like a side character. This doesn’t suit me.”

“We might have to get used to it – he’s going to need a mentor.”

“The kid?”

May nods.

“That’s not your responsibility,” Olivia starts to object, but May lifts a hand and shakes her head.

“ _Someone_ has to care. I’m one of the best equipped. He needs someone who’ll know what he’s going through. And it’ll be fine – I’m not the only one he’s got to lean on, after all. He’s got his family, his friends, people who’ll share the load. I can stay more in the background. I... think I’m looking forward to it.”

Liv watches the lights from the cars passing outside move across the wall, the flicker of the TV screen on the ceiling, the cold snow falling that she can see beyond the half-slatted blinds.

“How do you do it?”

“What do you mean?” May asks, mild surprise tinging her voice.

“Why do you keep going?” May doesn’t answer, so Liv presses. “You could… retire. Get a spot as an adjunct. _You could leave_. I don’t get how you can stay here after… after everything.”

The wall clock ticks away the seconds.

“I’m probably not going to be able to,” says May at last. “They’re telling me the space is permanently compromised. Structurally, the house will be fine – eventually. But that’s not what they were talking about. It’d be too dangerous, even if there’s a new Spider-Man.”

“Oh.”

“Once the house is fixed up, I’ll look to sell it. Should be able to get a good offer. It’s a cultural landmark now, or something.” May rubs one of her hands over the other before setting them on her knees and standing up. “I need a cigarette.”

May cracks a window and blows the smoke outside. Liv can see it pluming out into the air and wraps the blankets around herself a little tighter.

“I’d like to stay with you,” she says. "If I can." 

She sees May freeze and stub out her smoke in an ashtray.

“… We’d have to talk about that,” she says carefully, and Liv thinks she can see May’s hand trembling as she braces against the wall behind her.

“Okay.”

“You’re not going to like what I’ll have to say.”

“You won’t like what I have to say either.”

“As long as we don’t end up repeating ourselves.”

“I think we’ll manage. Though I’ll probably kill all your houseplants.” Liv swallows.

“Just don’t touch my garden and you’ll be okay.”

This time, Olivia is the one who reaches out her hand. Tentative.

May crosses the room to take it.

**Author's Note:**

> It’s been about 4 years since I last wrote a fanfiction but _guess who’s back to write about older queer women_. I specifically wanted to operate off of a few key assumptions: 1) Liv is a villain because of her choices, not because of influences on her decisions; aka, she's just _like that_ , so I'm deliberately breaking from some of the other Doc Ock canon that exists in other spaces and stories. 2) May is an incredibly strong woman, but I feel like her resiliency is hard-won and I wanted to explore some of the parts of her personality that I don't think we get to see in the movie (for instance, how she deals with grief). And 3) I wanted to explore this story assuming that they were committed to being in each other's lives, with all the messiness that entails given their particular circumstances. Thank you so much for reading.
> 
> Poems that are mentioned or quoted are as follows:
> 
>   * _XVI – No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone_ , written by Adrienne Rich between 1974-76 also by Adrienne Rich and excerpted from of “the Dream of a Common Language” part II – Twenty-one Love Poems (W. W. Norton and Company, 1978). This poem should probably be read in its entirety for this pairing, if I’m being honest.
>   * _Nights and Days_ , written by Adrienne Rich in 1976 and excerpted from the same book, part III – Not Somewhere Else, But Here.
>   * _The Buddha’s Last Instruction, The Lilies Break Open Over the Dark Water, Dogfish, The Journey, Acid, Strawberry Moon_ , and _The Swimming Lesson_ , all from New and Selected Poems: Volume one by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press, 1992). The Lilies Break is the one that May quotes to Liv in bed; Dogfish is what May thinks to herself while walking through the park after they fight. The other poems are what she reads to herself on days when she’s avoiding the news, and I pulled a single line from each of the poems in the order they’re listed, ending with Acid. I think May reads a lot of Mary Oliver to keep herself grounded, almost like a part of a spiritual practice. Is this projection? MAYBE SO.
>   * When they’re being really domestic, May reads out a line from the poem _Variation on the Word Sleep_ , From Selected Poems II: 1976-1986 by Margaret Atwood. (Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
> 

> 
> I mention 826NYC which is part of the 826 National group – they’ve got a mission “to encourage the exploration of endless possibility through the power of writing. To empower students with the skills to write their own paths forward, undefined by circumstance. To support new and exciting approaches to writing and inspire student engagement. And to foster generations of creative writers and thinkers, who together will define a better future”, according to their website which you can visit at 826NYC.org (they’re some deeply cool programs across America, and all support helps).
> 
> Extra-special shout-outs to my primary beta-readers: the-wormwoods (on Tumblr; also at thewormwoods.com), to starfoozle (my wife!), and i-guess-that-happened (on Tumblr) for your grammar checks, reactions to key scenes, and suggestions for how to shift things around and make it coherent. Also thank you to any other friends who watched me write this from a 9-page drabble that kinda sucked to a 15-page piece gaining coherency, to this beast (29 pages and 13k+ words) that I’m.. actually really happy with. 
> 
> I would also be real remiss if I didn’t give a shoutout to the work of Hattersarts on Tumblr (in particular, to her comic “Something You Have to Explain” after which I immediately was overcome with the urge to write… something. This was a huge inspirational piece for some of the points of characterization. [Check it out here.](https://hattersarts.tumblr.com/post/184991070230/something-you-have-to-explain-a-livmay-comic-its) Actually, just go take a look at everything Hattersarts posted for this pairing. Edit (Sept 3rd 2019) She accepted a commission from me for these two and I love it so much! I'm linking it here for posterity and so that you all might enjoy it as well [from her Twitter](https://twitter.com/hattersarts/status/1168895317955227648), so please go show her some love [like at her Ko-Fi ](https://ko-fi.com/hattersarts)!! 
> 
> Other LivMay (or just generally Olivia) artists I appreciated while working on this were muffinpines, tiffbaxter, lieutenantkasatka, stemfetish, nubeinvernal, evast (all names on Tumblr accurate as of July 2019). So thank you all for your service (go see if they have a Ko-Fi as well and tip your artists). 
> 
> Also thank you to Shipwash, who texted the group chat “Doc Ock hot” to which we all responded “wait, what?” and after which I’ve never been the same.
> 
> Cheers.


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